About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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Discover Salman Rushdie’s critically acclaimed magical realist study of good and evil. 
 
'A masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a plane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices. 
 
Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation? 
 
'A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling' V.S. Pritchett

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. 
 
Selected from the books Shame, Imaginary Homelands and East, West by Salman Rushdie 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
 Love by Jeanette Winterson 
Liberty by Virginia Woolf 
Race by Toni Morrison 
 Sisters by Louisa May Alcott

Home

Vintage Minis

‘Salman Rushdie's greatest novel’ Sunday Times 
 
Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby is the last in line of a crooked and fantastical dynasty of spice merchants and crime lords from Cochin. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As we travel with him on a route that takes him from India to Spain, he spins his labyrinthine family tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. 
 
But does the India of his parents – populated by extravagant artists, piratical gatekeepers and mysterious lost paintings – still exist? And will he ever discover what became of his fiery and tempestuous mother? Moraes’ epic quest to uncover the truth of the past is a love story to a vanishing world, and also its last hurrah. 
 
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

The Moor's Last Sigh

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic 
 
Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal. 
 
‘Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives’ The Times

Shame

The extraordinary literary debut of Salman Rushdie: ‘A firework of a book, funny and endlessly surprising’ Ursula Le Guin 
 
Flapping Eagle is a young Axona Indian gifted with immortal life after drinking an elixir from his wayward sister. But after 777 years of sailing the world’s seas, he becomes weary of life, and sets out to find the mystical Calf Island, a place where his fellow immortals have gathered and created their own version of the human race. 
 
But Calf Island is a strange place – like its inhabitants, it is both blessed and cursed. Sensing a terrible darkness at the heart of the island, Flapping Eagle sets out to scale the island’s peak and confront its mysterious and potent creator, Grimus himself. 
 
'A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present day... Grimus is a parallel form of life, and conjuring of an alternative society' Financial Times

Grimus

'A wonderful, rich and humane novel... a classic' Guardian 
 
Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. 
 
However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious. 
 
*WINNER OF THE BOOKER AND BEST OF THE BOOKER PRIZE* 
 
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** 
 
WITH A NEW 40TH ANNIVERSARY INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Midnight's Children

A special edition of the booker-prize winning novel

Angela Carter

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SALMAN RUSHDIE 
 
As well as her eight novels, Angela Carter published four wonderful collections of short stories during her lifetime, and contributed stories to several anthologies. The stories were scattered amongst different publishers, and a couple of the volumes are now out of print. In Burning your Boats they are gathered for the first time; this is a key collection and a major event for Angela Carter aficionados.

Burning Your Boats

Collected Short Stories

Italo Calvino

'I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends' Salman Rushdie 
 
From the age of twelve, the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond, living up in the trees. He walks through paths made from the twisted branches of olive, makes his bed in a holly oak, bathes in a fountain constructed from poplar bark. An aerial library holds the books with which he educates himself in philosophy and mathematics. Suspended among the leaves, the Baron adventures with bandits and pirates, conducts a passionate love affair, and watches the Age of Enlightenment pass by beneath him. 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

The Baron in the Trees

Xiaolu Guo

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language a muddle of personal pronouns and moody verbs. But with increasing fluency in English surviving turns to living. And they say that the best way to learn a language is to fall in love with a native speaker… 
 
Selected from the book A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Babies by Anne Enright 
 Depression by William Styron 
 Race by Toni Morrison 
 Home by Salman Rushdie

Language

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave’s utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption… 
 
Selected from Irvine Welsh's novel Ecstasy. 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Dreams by Sigmund Freud 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Work by Joseph Heller

Rave

Raymond Carver

The unparalleled short story collection by the great Raymond Carver, master of spare, powerful prose and one of the great American short story writers. 
 
This powerful collection of stories is set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. In the opening story a man whose wife and children have left him, rearranges all his furniture on the lawn. And in each subsequent story sadness, pain and drudgery propel the characters towards their fate. But through the darkness, vivid colloquial narration and a razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate illuminate all the comedy and tragedy of ordinary life. 
 
‘The master craftsman of the modern American short story’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘One of America's most original, truest voices’ Salman Rushdie 
 
'The most celebrated story collection from one of the true American masters' New York Review of Books

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Halldór Laxness

The great Icelandic novel written by a Nobel prize-winner, this is a magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man's dogged struggle for independence. 
 
‘In Iceland it’s the canon, but to me it’s a cult classic’ Zadie Smith 
 
‘I defy anyone to finish Halldór Laxness's Independent People without wetting the pages with tears’ Jonathan Franzen 
 
‘Favourite book? Independent People… I love it’ Ann Patchett 
 
Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land in rural Iceland. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever. 
 
‘A masterpiece’ David Mitchell 
‘It moved me immensely’ Barbara Kingsolver 
‘One of the great novels’ Ian McEwan 
‘Funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant’ Annie Proulx 
‘A great Icelandic novel…It’s an epic’ Max Porter 
‘An amazing book… A stunning piece of work’ Cillian Murphy 
'Laxness is a magnificent writer' Salman Rushdie 
'Laxness’ contribution to both Icelandic and world literature cannot be overstated' Andrey Kurkov

Independent People

R K Narayan

Discover one of India's most valued and adored twentieth-century novelists, including his novel Swami and Friends. 
 
Here are three of R. K. Narayan's most famous and best loved novels: Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. All set in the imaginary Indian town of Malgudi, these irresistible works provide the perfect introduction to a universal world of humour, sadness, wisdom and joy. 
 
 **Featuring one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

A Malgudi Omnibus

Krishna, an English teacher in the town of Malgudi, nagged by the feeling he's doing the wrong work, is nonetheless delighted by his domestic life, where his wife and young daughter wait for him outside the house every afternoon. Devastated by the death of his wife, Krishna comes to realise what he really wants to do, and makes a decision that will change his life forever.

The English Teacher

The first that indolent young Sriram knows about Mahatma Ghandi's visit to Malgudi is when a collection box is waved beneath his nose by the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. The vision's name is Bharato. Capable and quick-witted, her scorn for her gauche but ardent admirer is almost equal to her devotion to the Mahatma. Yet that is how Sriram leaves Malgudi to become a passionate apostle of the Quit India campaign - only to find his convictions tested by the rigours of a prison cell.

Waiting For The Mahatma

Anita Desai

Hugo Baumgartner is a man who doesn’t belong anywhere. He's a Berlin Jew who travelled to India to escape the Nazis and, after years spent the mercy of his past and his tumultuous adopted land, he has now retired to a seedy cat-filled apartment behind Bombay's Taj Hotel. But destiny has not finished with Baumgartner, in this haunting tale of the afflictions of exile.

Baumgartner's Bombay

George Saunders

THE 2017 MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF LINCOLN IN THE BARDO 
 
In his first collection, George Saunders' vision of our near future is as black and funny as you can get. He takes us on a trip to the shopping malls and theme parks and enviromental hazards that lie just around the chronological corner, introducing us to a gang of misfits and losers struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. Bizarre but familiar, fierce but always humane, these are stunningly original stories by a master of the form. 
 
'Saunders is a morally passionate, serious writer, who perfectly expresses the madness of the times we live in. He will be read long after these times have passed' Zadie Smith 
 
'He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him' Jonathan Franzen 
 
'There is no-one better, no-one more essential' Dave Eggers

Civilwarland In Bad Decline

Ten-year-old Swaminathan is living in exciting times. The sleeping giant of India is beginning to stir to the dwelling reverberations which herald the great struggle for independence. But it's all rather confusing for the boy. For like his family and friends, Swami has been immutably moulded by his British rulers - and though he might happily demonstrate against them, he wouldn't dream of missing cricket practice.

Swami And Friends

In the shade of a banyan tree sits Margayva, self-styled advisor on the complex minor transactions which are an integral part of Indian life. Who else would you consult if you wanted a loan from the local Co-operative Bank?But a scrape with officialdom in the form of an unplanned interview with the Bank's Secretary - and a mishap which finds his spoilt son Balu throwing his accounts book down a drain - temporarily cuts short a lucrative career.

The Financial Expert

Joseph Heller

On paper, Bruce Gold seems to have carved a comfortable niche for himself. But in the flesh, he's not so impressive. His ancient father thinks he's a fool, his children fail to notice him and even his wife doesn't realise he's no longer living with her. Gold's been promised a prestigious government post in Washington - only he's never been told what the position actually is. Hugely funny and sweetly sad, Good as Gold is the story of children grown up, parents grown old, anad lovers grown apart.

Good As Gold

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZE 
 
Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America. 
 
Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.

Fasting, Feasting

To the family living in the shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp reminder of life outside tradition. For Bim, coping endlessly with their problems, there is a renewal of the old jealousies for, unlike her sister, she has failed to escape. Looking at both the cruelty and the beauty of family life and the harshness of India's modern history, Clear Light of Day brilliantly evokes the painful process of confronting and healing old wounds.

Clear Light of Day

Chandran is a good-natured, popular, rather dreamy student who works hard to pass his exams. Newly graduated, he is unsure how he wants to spend his future. And then, one evening, walking by the river, he sees Malathi, a beautiful young girl dressed in a radiant green sari  But the course of love does not run smoothly. Not all is well in Chandran's horoscope and while some customs can be forgotten, others must be strictly observed: customs that temporarily cause Chandran to turn his back on the legendary Malgudi altogether.

The Bachelor Of Arts

Margaret Kennedy

According to a sensational West End play, the Victorian children's writer, Dorothea Harding, was no dowdy maiden aunt, but the passionate participant in a torrid, tragic romance. It is the task of Roy Collins to turn the play into an equally popular film. Dorothea's descendents have only weak objections to the misuse of their relation's private past - they need money more than dignity. But Roy has misgivings, and when a set of revealing letters are discovered, he begins to feel that the truth might be more important than the story.

The Wild Swan

James Hilton

The gripping adventure that invented the mystery of Shangri-La. 
 
 Flying out of India, a light aircraft is hi-jacked and flown into the high Tibetan Himalayas. The few passengers on board anxiously await their fate, among them Conway, a talented British consul. But on landing they are unexpectedly conducted to a remote valley, a legendary paradise of peace and beauty, known as Shangri-La. Have they been kidnapped? Can they escape? And do they even want to? 
 
From the author of Goodbye Mr Chips, this is the epic adventure story of literature's most entrancing utopia and one of our most enduring literary mysteries.

Lost Horizon

Toni Morrison

A stunning, timeless story about race, friendship, what keeps us apart and what drives us apart, from the one and only Toni Morrison, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. 
 
Twyla and Roberta met in a girls’ shelter as children. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then on opposing sides of a protest. The two women are seemingly at opposite ends of every issue, but the persistence of their bond is undeniable. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

Recitatif

Iris Murdoch

Carel is widowed rector presiding over a London church destroyed during the war. The rectory is home to an array of residents: his daughter, Muriel; his beautiful invalid ward, Elizabeth; their West Indian servant, Pattie; Eugene, a Russian emigre, and his delinquent son, Leo. Carel's brother, Marcus, is co-guardian of Elizabeth, but his attempts to get closer to the rector are constantly rebuffed. 
 
These seven characters maintain a constant dance of attraction and repulsion, misunderstanding and revelation, the centre of which is the enigmatic Carel himself - a priest who believes that, God being dead, His angels have been released.

The Time Of The Angels

Yukio Mishima

Mishima&rsquo;s literary powers are on full display in his penultimate novel, a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy. 
 
Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business. He is granted an audience with a young Thai princess known as 'Moonlight', an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. Convinced she is a reincarnated spirit, he undertakes a long, arduous pilgrimage to the holy places of India. There he encounters her again. But the princess has become one more embodiment of all that Honda cannot possess. 
 
'An elegy to the loss of pureness in the Japanese national spirit' Japan Times

The Temple of Dawn

George Eliot

150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH 
 
Discover one of the most admired, best loved and influential novels in the history of English literature. 
 
'If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life...' 
 
Dorothea is bright, beautiful and rebellious. Lydgate is the ambitious new doctor in town. Both of them long to make a positive difference in the world. But their stories do not proceed as expected and both they, and the other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world. 
 
Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance, but above all it gives us a vision of what lies within the human heart. 
 
VINTAGE CLASSICS 150th ANNIVERSARY GIFT EDITION 
George Eliot's novel was first published in eight instalments, in an innovative new style of serialisation. The earliest part, entitled MIDDLEMARCH, Book 1 - Miss Brooke, was published on 1st December 1871. It was an instant commercial and critical success, and continues to captivate readers 150 years later. 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Middlemarch

The 150th Anniversary Edition introduced by Zadie Smith

Shani Mootoo

EVERYONE THINKS MALA IS A MURDERER 
 
'A Caribbean classic' Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch 
 
------- 
 
Everyone in Paradise thinks Mala Ramchandin is a murderer. But with no body, no evidence and no witnesses, Mala is sent to an Alms House as a madwoman instead of prison. Here she meets Tyler, the only openly queer person on the island of Lantanacamara with whom she feels an affinity as an outsider. Despite Mala's muteness, she manages to communicate with Tyler about her missing sister, Asha. 
 
This is Mala's story, and an appeal to find Asha, told in Tyler's words. He dives deeply into Mala's family history, uncovering years of trauma passed down through generations and - staggeringly, beautifully - the love that has survived through it all. 
 
With an introduction by Ingrid Persaud. 
 
'Visceral, sensual and heartbreakingly tender' Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, author of When We Were Birds 
'A story of magical power' Alice Munro, author of Dear Life 
'Will remind many readers of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things' Kirkus 
'Clearly ahead of its time' Bookseller 
 
FINALIST FOR THE GILLER PRIZE 
FINALIST FOR THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

Cereus Blooms at Night

The Booker-Longlisted Queer Classic

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